


let the rain kiss you

by Raven (singlecrow)



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Gen, Loss, Love, M/M, Race, you really really can't go home again
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-26
Updated: 2013-08-26
Packaged: 2017-12-24 18:42:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/943346
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/pseuds/Raven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos has been out of town more than a year. Back home, he has an overflowing mailbox, an influx of freshmen, a perky new research assistant, and an awful sense that somehow, somewhere, he's forgetting something.</p>
            </blockquote>





	let the rain kiss you

Sitting out on his doorstep, Carlos looks through it all: overdue library book reminders, warnings about saving water in these times of drought, every mathematical combination of money off Domino's. He extracts anything important and places it in a pile beside him, and at the bottom there is a postcard, entirely black. The text reads: _YOU THOUGHT I WAS KIDDING. TURN ON YOUR RADIO._

Carlos was a grad student for a long time and owning a radio implies more permanence than any of his living arrangements have warranted. He goes back inside and looks at his computer for a while, wondering if he can use it for something other than Spotify; then he gives up and fishes out his keys. In the car the dial is stuck on a station broadcasting nothing but static, probably atmospheric interference and cosmic radiation, and something that sounds a little like whispers.

*

After a week, he's swept out the dust, opened the windows to air the place, and called all the right people so he has DSL and gas to cook with. This last is such a triumph that he calls his new research assistant on what he later discovers is her first night in town after a recent move cross-country, and asks if she wants to come over for dinner.

"It's nothing special," he says, awkwardly, "just chilli, and sour cream…"

"It could be toenails on toast for all I care," she declares, fervently happy over the phone, "do you know how many places to eat there are between here and Albuquerque that aren't crappy Taco fucking Bell, let me give you a clue, it's how you solve fucking quadratics."

Carlos laughs and gives her his address. She appears twenty minutes later with a bottle of wine and a deep appreciation for his mother's recipe, and Carlos thinks he may be a little bit easy, but she's pretty much endeared himself to him forever. Over the food, served on plates Carlos finally found at the back of a cupboard a couple of days earlier, with cutlery that's been travelling around with him since undergrad, which may explain why the spoons have "Property of Cornell University Agricultural Experiment Station" stamped on them, she stares at him with sudden horror and says, "Look, Carlos – not that I'm not grateful, seriously, I am grateful, this is awesome, but you're not… this isn't, like, a date or anything? Because, I think you ought to know, well. I'm gay."

She's wide-eyed, pretty, dark-skinned, entirely a category error, and Carlos bursts into laughter. "You and me," he promises, "we're gonna be friends."

They make a start on it, that night, comparing notes on local restaurants and bitching about how neither of them will ever get tenure, until she looks at her watch a couple of hours later and gives a jaw-cracking yawn; he sends her home with a box of the leftovers and they exchange tired smiles on the front step. Once she's gone he turns around and leans against the door, looks at the unwashed dishes and unpacked boxes and everything else that's messy and impermanent but, is at least, his, and lets out a satisfied sigh.

Despite the wine, which was pretty good for something with a picture of what looks like roadkill on the label, he doesn't sleep. He sits out on the porch late into the night, listening to the distant sounds of the city, feeling like he's forgotten, not the mail, nor the telephone service, nor the electricity bill, but something.

*

"So what were you doing, out there?" his research assistant asks him in the morning, idly stirring her coffee as she looks out of the window of the lab. It's a bright, beautiful California morning, with a breeze coming in from the water. The blinds stir, and Carlos breathes in, enjoying the scent of the cypresses outside the window.

"Out where?" he asks. "On fieldwork? It was out in the Southwest, a little desert town. I was doing an environmental survey."

"You were out there a long time, if the state of your apartment is anything to go by." She smiles at him. "Mould isn't supposed to grow its own mould." 

"It was a long-term project!" he protests. "There was a guy subletting for a while, but he moved out weeks ago."

She considers. "You should set up a control group for your kitchen. Alexander Fleming would get down on his knees and cry."

"He could afford to, he had tenure." Carlos pauses in looking at his email. He's got more than a hundred messages unopened, though he doesn't remember going that long without checking it. "Wait, is the other coffee for me?"

"Even I don't drink two venti cups before breakfast, Carlos." She tosses her dreads. "I stopped by Starbucks on the way up, figured I owed you a favour. Tell your mom her chilli improves with keeping."

"Dana, I love you," he says, happily, and then the coffee is just how he likes it, with two shots of espresso and made with soya milk. "Entirely platonically, of course."

"Of course," she agrees, grinning. "What, you're not into girls at all? Because I can tell you, my friend, you are missing out."

Carlos grins and gives her an honest answer. "I dated girls in high school," he says. "They were pretty nice. But since then, guys. The same one through quite a lot of a grad school, but it didn't work out."

"Anyone right now?" she asks lightly, passing him over a stirrer for his coffee.

"No," Carlos says, and then, a little unsure, "I think – no."

*

That night, he dreams that he's standing in an apartment he doesn't recognise, but with some of his own books on the shelves and the experiment station cutlery in the drainer. The man sitting at the table has brown skin and dark, large eyes. He's leaning back in his chair and saying something to Carlos, something he can't make out. From the shape of his mouth it looks like _I love you_ , only half lost in laughter.

It's an unsettling dream. Carlos wakes up feeling hot and thirsty.

*

The week before the undergraduates come back, Carlos walks down the street towards the little station and sits on the Caltrain platform, waiting for the northbound service. When it comes the train is almost too painful to look at, the sun glittering off the silver unpainted surface, split into reflections by the window panes. He gets into the quiet air-conditioned coach and settles by the window, looking out at the opposite platform, at the guys in uniforms, going from person to person, saying things he can't hear. The landscape blurs as the train picks up speed, but lingers in his memory, an unsettling tableau. He runs his errands in the city as planned, stops by a couple of bookstores and the public library because he can't help himself, makes small talk with tourists on a Segway tour – _no, it's not always this hot; we're hoping the cooler weather comes soon_ – but that moment, lit by hard, brilliant sunshine, stays with him.

Dana chuckles when he tells her about it, later. He picked up take-out pho for them both on the way back and he's looking through the books he bought in San Francisco while she finds plates and napkins. "You know down in Arizona, they've got that racist-as-fuck law…"

"Yeah." Carlos leans back. "Yeah, I know. I was applying for grants for fieldwork in the Southwest at the time."

She rolls her eyes, although it's not at him, he understands. "You want a fork or chopsticks?"

"Fork." He gets up for a minute to open the window: it's far too hot, and even with his shirt collar loosened and his jeans rolled up, he's not feeling all that cool in either sense of the word. "That's the secret police, I guess."

"No," Dana says, looking at him with surprise in her eyes. "That's just the police."

*

By late August, the heat is becoming unbearable. Carlos ought to be writing a syllabus. Instead, he's lying on his own futon, the blanket that usually lives folded up on the side thrown to the floor. It's a great shame, he thinks distantly; he'd just got the place liveable and it's turning into a mess of clutter again. Dana is at the window, looking out at the cavalcade of new freshmen and their parents' SUVs. "You want to fill out a survey?" she calls.

"Why," Carlos demands, from under a cushion, "the fuck, would I want to fill out a survey?"

Dana sits down on the edge of the futon. "Oh, I don't know," she says, clear as a bell, "seeing as you're too sick to work, play Monopoly or read Damn You Autocorrect, but you keep complaining about how you're bored, maybe you can fill out this survey that came in the mail and stop bugging me for five minutes while you do it."

It's a summer cold, which Carlos's mother always declared, sagely, were much worse than the other kind – although living here, he supposes all colds are summer ones. The temperature is pushing ninety degrees and his tongue feels like an untraversed space of desert. "Fine," he snaps, and then sighs. "Sorry. Sorry. I do appreciate you coming over. None of my other research assistants was this nice to me. Except Graeme, and his mom went to school with my mom way back when. I think. Maybe he just had a crush on me, I don't know."

"Carlos, you're rambling."

"Probably," he agrees, and takes her chewed pencil and starts filling out the survey. It's a glossy publication – from the university's something something department of equality something and diversity, he thinks. It's hard to get the pencil to write on it. He's concentrating hard enough that it takes him a few minutes before he notices the sound of gathering thunder, the cooling air. "Hey, Dana," he calls, "you got any Latina in you?"

She inspects the skin on her palms critically. "Not that I know of. Why?"

Carlos picks up the pencil and peers at the question, _How frequently do you spend time with people of another race/ethnicity?_ and meticulously circles 'sometimes', then changes it to 'always', then sets the pencil down and falls asleep to the sound of the coming storm, feeling strange and confused.

*

Night Vale has community dreaming twice a month, on a Tuesday. The first twenty-four times it happened, Carlos stayed awake all night on purpose, working blearily in his lab watching the streetlights flicker; the twenty-fifth time, Cecil took his hand halfway to sleep and promised to look after him, if he would promise to try not to hide in the (metaphorical) kitchen and do his best to (metaphorically) mingle. Carlos remembers the experience as a sequence of synaesthetic impressions, Cecil blithely pointing out Old Woman Josie and Hiram McDaniels and Mayor Winchell even though to Carlos they all looked like large bursts of irregular light that made him want to sneeze. He woke up tired and a little nauseous but nevertheless calm beneath, as though there was something grounding him, something settled. He was still holding Cecil's hand.

This time is different. He's standing by a kitchen table. It's Cecil's kitchen, but the table is too large for the space, made of stripped pine and warm to the touch: it's the table Carlos ate at from when he was old enough for solids, to the week before he went away to college. "Beautiful, perfect Carlos," Cecil murmurs, a little weakly, with worry undercutting the affection. "It's so good to see you."

"You too," Carlos says, heartfelt, reaching out for him. "I think I saw you – before, I mean. But I didn't remember. Why can I…"

"Fever." Cecil smiles, delicate and soft. Carlos thinks dispassionately that he probably loves Cecil more than he's ever loved anyone. It’s a frightening thought; it makes him feel dizzy. He sits down and Cecil rests his head on his shoulder and they stay like that for a moment, just breathing. Carlos can still hear the thunder. "Beautiful, perfect Carlos," Cecil murmurs again, some kind of benediction. 

Carlos reaches out, his fingers uncurling to thread through Cecil's hair, then pulls up short. "Cecil, you don't…" He pauses, sits back a little. "You – don't look that good. I mean, you look…"

Cecil lifts his head. "Carlos, what is it?'

Carlos stops and tries again. "I think" – he reaches out with his other hand, breathes in sharply – "I think I can see through you."

Cecil shakes his head. "That's not me," he says, tiredly. "That's you."

*

"Maybe it's some sort of food poisoning," Dana says wonderingly, as they both sit next to the window thrown wide open, intermittently splashed with the force of the rain. "You don't look well."

"No," Carlos says, his breathing rapid and panicky. There's something he should be able to remember. "That's not it." Down on the street below a bunch of white freshmen guys look at up them both framed by the window; irrationally he wants to duck. "Did you ever think something was missing," he asks Dana, feeling a little out of control, "that if you'd just – done something different, that you can't quite remember, you could… if you were just… different, it would be easier?"

Dana looks at him. "Yeah, honey," she says, weary, touching his shoulder.

*

He does get better. Outside it rains all the time, steady and unrelenting, so the radio talks in hushed tones about the forty days and forty nights until Carlos wants to throw it out of the window shouting something about the dignified science of meteorology. He doesn't because the radio is Dana's, a little portable she put in the corner of the lab. Carlos teaches his first class of the semester, something something 101. He knows he's distracted and he's going to lose them all to add-drop. He's still not sleeping well at night.

And then it's evening, a quiet, slow evening. He's thinking about maybe getting in the swing of cooking properly again – Dana will like it if he does, and in any case the lab trashcan is embarrassingly full of foil containers – but wondering vaguely if he can concentrate on anything long enough to avoid burning the place down, and then outside, the rain stops. 

"Cecil," Carlos says, suddenly. He's standing in the middle of the room, surrounded by a clear space of the floor, open like desert. "Cecil, oh, fuck, _Cecil_."

He thinks he's going to throw up for a minute, and then it passes. Dana gets up, looks like she's coming to some sort of decision, then she crosses the space between them in a couple of strides and pulls him into a hug. He's taller than her and it's a little awkward, but he's grateful and he holds on.

"I guess," he murmurs into her hair, "he sent you with me, to make sure I'd remember."

She draws away and looks at him for a second. "No," she says seriously. 

"But - Cecil knew this would happen." He looks at her and breathes in, remembering the postcard. "He knew, if I left Night Vale, that…"

"Yes." Dana's expression is perfectly even. "Yes, he did."

"Then why did he let me go?" Carlos bursts out, aware that he must be sounding totally unhinged, but somehow very far from caring, feeling like something of the tumult of weather has got inside him, the storm rising beneath his skin. "If he _knew_ , then why…"

"Because that isn't who Cecil is!" Dana snaps back. "Because Cecil loves you, you stupid fucking idiot!" She stops and visibly calms herself. "Because Night Vale is a terrible, terrible place. Remember when we went into the city?"

"Yeah," Carlos says, and sits down on the edge of a table, suddenly feeling tired. After a moment Dana comes to sit next to him, and they're both quiet for a minute.

"It was fun," Dana says, presently, and that, at least, is true. Just before classes started Carlos found she'd never been to San Francisco and insisted they both take a day off and go hit the tourist trail. They finished the day in Golden Gate Park, sharing a bag of sweet popcorn and watching the sun set over the bay. "You think we could have done that in Night Vale? You think he could hold you when you wanted to go?"

Carlos shakes his head, then nods, then shakes his head again. "But Cecil," he says, and sighs. "Cecil. Cecil, and Night Vale."

Dana grins wanly at him. "Yeah."

"There's a lot of terrible things in the world," Carlos says reflectively. "Why _did_ you come with me, then?" 

Dana stands up. "It's a long way," she says. "You'll want someone to share the driving."

Carlos nods. "It is… a long way," he says tentatively. 

Dana looks at him. "And there's nothing to eat except…"

"Crappy Taco fucking Bell," he says, grinning. He throws his car keys up in the air and Dana catches them. "Hey," he adds, going around the room turning out the lights, "it's, like, seven hundred miles. What do you bet we get pulled over for Driving While Brown?"

"No bet." She inclines her head. "Though I bet the City Council has banned driving under the influence of shitty fake enchiladas."

"Knew they'd get it right eventually," Carlos says. He's tired and hungry. But he could make chilli again soon, he thinks. He could use his mother's recipe and the copper-bottomed pot that Cecil's mother gave him. The cumin would brown and sizzle in the oil. The pot is too heavy to take anywhere, but Dana could come over. They could sit at the kitchen table with the windows open and eat, and Cecil would be there, quiet as he always is when not on air, but teasing Dana and getting up to pour some more wine. And maybe Carlos could sit there and not talk, necessarily, but listen to them: he could breathe in the scent of the food and the cool desert air; he could wear his own skin. 

"Ready," Dana says quietly.

The lights are out, the blinds are closed. Out in the parking lot they both kick through puddles, dodge the water dripping heavily from the trees. They drive out of the city, heading south, and the roads are quiet. Carlos smiles at Dana and squeezes her hand. As the landscape slips past into comforting blur, he turns the dial to static and waits for the radio.


End file.
